Sermon Tone Analysis

Stockholm Syndrome

I will tell you the story of Beauty and the Beast.

No, it is not a story about me and Jono.

It is the tragic story of a young girl who finds herself in captivity with a savage, feral monster.

We watch, painfully, as she descends into madness, talking to herself and imagining the furniture and dishes responding to her, singing and dancing.

She exhibits all the signs of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with and then falling in love with her captor, until, in a final betrayal, she helps the beast fight off her friends, family and neighbors who have come to rescue her.

And she breaks with all reality and imagines that her terrible and cruel beastly captor is really her Prince Charming in disguise.

One of the most heart-breaking films of all time, not recommended for children.

I will tell you the story of another beast: Samson.

Samson the Beast

Recap story so far...

Samson lust for the Philistine woman, he sets up the marriage.

Then at the feast he gives this ridiculous and terrible riddle.

They press his wife for the answer, she whines to Samson for seven days and he gives in.

They tell Samson the riddle and he declares “If you had not plowed with my heifer you never would have solved it!”

Nice.

He goes to the big city, 23 miles away, kills 30 men, strips their clothes, and brings them back to pay his bet.

Samson the Beast.

But wait, there’s more.

After some days, maybe months, Samson comes back to visit his new wife as if nothing has happened.

And Samson took that well?

Nope.

You’re making me angry!!!

You won’t like me when I’m angry!

Probably jackals (same Hebrew word).

The Philistines respond and his would-be wife pay the price.

And how do you think Samson responds to that?

Almost the same words as before:

“hip and thigh” either is a reference to him kind of hand-to-hand combat… or that he “ripped them limb from limb” as some translations have it.

He tore them apart, he beat them up, he attacked and defeated them.

And then he fled to a cleft, a cave, where he wouldn’t be easily approached by a lot of men.

Skipping forward, he ends up bound and taken to the Philistines.

He goes hulk mode, by the Spirit of the Lord, and rips through his bonds as if they were flax (or straw) on fire.

He grabs the nearest weapon… a donkey bone.

Fresh = moist.

As a student of donkey-fu myself (which is martial arts using various parts of a donkey), it is well known that a jawbone is the best weapon available amongst the available bones of a donkey!

My question is, didn’t some of the first guys killed have a sword?

Swap out, Samson!

He kills 1000 men (or the whole company) this way.

And then he makes a crude little ditty, almost a limerick, I picture him dancing and singing after:

There is a pun here because “ass” and “heap” are the same word in Hebrew (ḥămôr)

One translator says “With the jawbone of an ass I have piled them in a mass” to try to capture the crude wordplay.

Samson is very punny here.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the judge, the hero of Israel:

This guy?

This guy judges Israel?

In what sense?

We don’t have any record of him sitting under a palm tree calmly deciding between tribes.

I don’t think he was that kind of judge.

Instead, Scripture appears to be calling what Samson is doing here, his one man war against the Philistines, it is calling that “judging” Israel.

Somehow an act of leadership?

Freedom fighter or terrorist?

Who is this guy?

From the perspective of his people, he could be called a troublemaker, a rebel, a guerilla fighter, the Rebellion.

From the perspective of the Philistines, he is killing non-combatants, he is attacking food supplies: Samson is a terrorist.

His motivations: anger and lust (as we saw last week).

God doesn’t wait until Samson is righteous and perfect, he uses even his sin to accomplish his will.

But Samson wouldn’t be dangerous if the Holy Spirit didn’t keep giving him super powers!

So what is God doing here?

But what is God’s will here?

I think we get a hint in the part of the story I skipped.

We can see what God is doing to his enemies, to the Philistines.

Samson is a one-man army, a point of resistance, a stumbling block to the Philistines, a rabble-rouse, a troublemaker.

But what is God doing through Samson to His own people?

How are the Children of Israel responding to God’s work through Samson?

In response to Samson first burning the fields and then ripping apart some Philistines who attacked his almost-wife:

They bound him.

Their judge.

The man of God among them, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

“Do you now know that the Philistines are rulers over us?” Think how much trouble we are going to be in!

When the men of Judah were confronted with the conflict between the trouble-making Spirit of God and the enemy, they bound the man of Spirit and handed him over to the enemy.

When the men of Judah were confronted with the conflict between the trouble-making Spirit of God and the enemy, they bound the man of Spirit and handed him over to the enemy.

They were comfortable in their captivity.

They were complacent in their chains.

They wanted peace above freedom.

Security above God’s Sovereignty.

In their defence, they were probably still there for this jawbone battle and there were 3000 (or 3 companies) of them.

They apparently stood back and watched Samson kill all the Philistines with the jawbone.

And, keep in mind, they are the ones celebrating this almost mythological feat hundreds of years later in this text.

But they are turning over, in the person of Samson, they are fighting against the work of the Holy Spirit to rescue them.

And God uses even that sin for His glory and His purpose.

He works to rescue them anyway.

How amazing is that!

But the Philistines will plague Israel for another 200 years, and I think this attitude of the Israelites has everything to do with that.

They were comfortable in their captivity.

They liked their chains… as long as they weren’t too tight and no one stirred up the enemy too much.

But the trouble-making Spirit of God was not content that His people should remain in captivity.

He is a chain-breaker.

God was not, and is not, content that you and I should remain in captivity of any kind.

Jesus the Troublemaker

It all reminds me of another trouble maker.

A stumbling block, both to the enemy, the rulers of the world in that time, the Romans; and to the people of God.

Once again, the men of Judah bind the man of Spirit, the man of God, the freedom fighter… they bind him and turn him over to the enemy.

But this man of God goes all the way into the teeth of the enemy.

Through Roman judgment, through crucifixion, to the true enemy: sin and death.

And there he defeats them utterly.

He shattered the chains, he forever ended our captivity to sin and death, to this world and the powers of this world.

And that trouble-making Spirit of God… he is not content that we should be content or comfortable pretending that we are still captives.

There is no such thing as comfortable Christianity.

Instead, Jesus says to us: